46 minutes ago, Pastaiolo said:

Why would they? All the better for us.

Because they are all waiting for xplane  12... 🤭

5 hours ago, jarmstro said:

I can't buy a new card for love nor money here in the UK. I have an RTX2070 and I've seen them going for £600 second hand on eBay here in the UK. It's unbelievable. Somethings up for sure,

You and everyone else with a desktop PC.

People keep saying they are expensive, really this from November 18, 2013:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/7521/nvidia-launches-tesla-k40

https://versus.com/en/nvidia-tesla-k40-vs-palit-geforce-rtx-3070-gamingpro

Just [finally] became really cheap.

$6000 K40 vs $600 RTX3070

Quote

755MHz faster GPU clock speed
1500MHz vs 745MHz

65.7 GPixel/s higher pixel rate
110.4 GPixel/s vs 44.7 GPixel/s

16.02 TFLOPS higher floating-point performance
20.31 TFLOPS vs 4.29 TFLOPS

138.6 GTexels/s higher texture rate
317.4 GTexels/s vs 178.8 GTexels/s

15W lower TDP
220W vs 235W

160GB/s more memory bandwidth
448GB/s vs 288GB/s

3008 more shading units
5888 vs 2880

12900 million more transistors
20000 million vs 7100 million

Njam Njam.

MSFS out of the box has shaders that can make some use of this, X-Plane right now needs something like ReShade - This is why early MSFS testers were all on RTX2080 GPUs

All that makes for great screenshots and nice short videos.

Pivoting graciously back on topic

12 hours ago, dresoccer4 said:

But this is comparing modded to stock simulators, so in some ways it's apple and oranges. 

I would posit what defines the "look" of a simulator in 2021 is how it can be made to look over any particular 2 hour flight in VR. This "stock vs modded" had more meaning when everyone believed the stock MSFS planes and scenery were going to be incantations of Mary Poppins (practically perfect in every way).

 

Edited March 30, 20215 yr by mSparks

I'm always looking for quality airports for TE FL and I saw that RWY26 Simulations released KMTH for XP and the images look just like what I see in MSFS. It's a new product, so I really had no idea that the sim could look so bright and beautiful. My question is how did they get the sky and the clouds to look the way they look on the pics? I'm still looking for way to get puffy looking clouds that extend further toward the horizon. Based on the pics I've seen, there's definitely a way.

Also if anyone has a way to eliminate the sudden (dramatic) weather changes in XP, please share how. This even happens with ASXP. By now I thought this was fixed.

17 minutes ago, DJJose said:

Also if anyone has a way to eliminate the sudden (dramatic) weather changes in XP

There is two ways, XEnviro, or my fork of enhanced cloudscapes.

My fork looks like MSFS clouds on super low quality, but hey, its free, open source, good for VR (mostly), works on Linux and:

XE looks good, but comes with the perf cost of looking good, and is also fairly expensive price wise. Good pics are likely using XE and Reshade.

Edited March 30, 20215 yr by mSparks

1 hour ago, mSparks said:

There is two ways, XEnviro, or my fork of enhanced cloudscapes.

My fork looks like MSFS clouds on super low quality, but hey, its free, open source, good for VR (mostly), works on Linux and:

XE looks good, but comes with the perf cost of looking good, and is also fairly expensive price wise. Good pics are likely using XE and Reshade.

I watched the Q8 Pilot video of xEnviro 1.16 and I was tempted to get it, but I was concerned with performance. I'll give your clouds a try.

Where can I get these freeware clouds?

I'd like smooth transitioning with ASXP live mode.

I have reshade working well and xVision so my main issue is draw distance and smooth transitions. If I can get this issue resolved, I will finally say that I have the perfect real sim for my needs.

1 hour ago, DJJose said:

Where can I get these freeware clouds?

https://github.com/mSparks43/Enhanced-Cloudscapes-Engine

need the windows installers that are listed on the 744 install instructions for C++ and multithreading support, with them it should just need this folder

https://github.com/mSparks43/Enhanced-Cloudscapes-Engine/tree/master/Enhanced_Cloudscapes_Engine

dropping into your plugins folder.

not quite finished yet, still the odd perf and draw issues, hoping for a "fog in the cockpit" fix from enhanced cloudscapes (the magic that actually does the drawing) sometime soon.

OP thread on here at

 

Edited March 30, 20215 yr by mSparks

Any news on XP12 yet? I also see Jim Kier joined the team. Is that the same Jim Kier that developed traffic global for X-Plane? 

32 minutes ago, Ianrivaldosmith said:

Any news on XP12 yet? I also see Jim Kier joined the team. Is that the same Jim Kier that developed traffic global for X-Plane? 

A new hud in v12 probably (posted about a month ago), as ben supnik confirmed no new features for v11. 

My guts feeling is the fsexpo laminar presentation will be a major reveal, it's also what they did with v11 release when they introduced PBR, the european autogen etc..

Edited March 30, 20215 yr by mtaxp

21 hours ago, mSparks said:

https://github.com/mSparks43/Enhanced-Cloudscapes-Engine

need the windows installers that are listed on the 744 install instructions for C++ and multithreading support, with them it should just need this folder

https://github.com/mSparks43/Enhanced-Cloudscapes-Engine/tree/master/Enhanced_Cloudscapes_Engine

dropping into your plugins folder.

not quite finished yet, still the odd perf and draw issues, hoping for a "fog in the cockpit" fix from enhanced cloudscapes (the magic that actually does the drawing) sometime soon.

OP thread on here at

 

Indeed a tremendous piece of freeware. They look very nice apart from the odd artefact. Unfortunately they have too great an FPS hit for me with anything other than a very small cloud draw distance so I'm sticking with 2D clouds for now. X-Vision seems to mush the default clouds into fluff which look a bit like they are 3D and are OK once you get used to them.

56 minutes ago, jarmstro said:

Unfortunately they have too great an FPS hit for me

There is a lot more to that story.

Firstly, it is "just" a shader, similar concept to

https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XslGRr

Even your phone can probably manage that at 30fps or more (I take that back, my A70 is doing 2fps, desktop vsync limited to 60fps)

and a bit of "engine" in there to determine if sim objects are in front or behind the clouds, and kaboom, a cloud engine.

Why the FPS hit?

Well, firstly its a "raytrace" technique,  the volume (pun intended) of calculations there are mind blowing, in this case raytracing/raymarching done in software (the text on the right of that link), the only way to do better is to switch to RTX hardware (up to 100 times faster than the same thing in software) - which needs "engine" changes.

AA On? - Its a raytrace technique, 2x AA means it has 4 times as much work to do rendering an image twice the dimension, unless you are on really top end card from the last 18 months, forget about AA with any kind a raytracing techniques, the best you get are denoising techniques.

Even low end hardware can render them at half or more resolution and turn off the denoising and use less GPU than CPU time (resulting in no FPS hit whatsoever) - but then they look absolutely horrific and barely like clouds at all.

This is why I do not get remotely excited when I see super shiny screenshots, 

This image is from 2005:

SRC:http://hof.povray.org/autobahn-050501-2.html

The reason neither Xplane nor MSFS can be made to look as good as some 15 year old plus open source rendering engine you ask?

The issue: runs at about 1 frame a day - on todays hardware that is probably down to probably seconds per frame.

This, btw, is why NVidia loves linux - all those massive budget CGI movies you love? made on Linux farms packed to the ceiling (literally) with Nvidia hardware using the same techniques, at 1 frame per day, if you have 1000 boxes, you can make 1000 frames a day - not cheap tho....

So yes, all the engines can be made to look as good as one another with a bit of dev effort to keep up with the hardware - the limiting factor hasnt been assets or software for a very long time.

 

Edited March 31, 20215 yr by mSparks

27 minutes ago, mSparks said:

This, btw, is why NVidia loves linux - all those massive budget CGI movies you love? made on Linux farms packed to the ceiling (literally) with Nvidia hardware using the same techniques, at 1 frame per day, if you have 1000 boxes, you can make 1000 frames a day - not cheap tho....

 

Well I've kept Linux and am enjoying learning to use it though I'm back on Windows for X-Plane.  It maybe isn't true to say you can't teach an old dog new tricks!😂

With regard to the clouds there's just no way I can live without sufficient AA to get rid of any jaggies no matter how pretty they look. Are you sure there isn't more to it? The MSFS clouds do not have a serious FPS impact for some reason.

Edited March 31, 20215 yr by jarmstro

1 minute ago, jarmstro said:

sufficient AA to get rid of any jaggies no matter how pretty they look

I feel ya.

Without solid, stutterless 60fps in VR there is no way I could switch back to 2D no matter how amazing the 2D screenshots are 😁

47 minutes ago, mSparks said:

I feel ya.

Without solid, stutterless 60fps in VR there is no way I could switch back to 2D no matter how amazing the 2D screenshots are 😁

I'm going to try VR for sure. But there's no point until I can upgrade and at the present time you can't get hold of new graphics cards and everything else is in short supply. For 30 years I've just regularly upgraded components but the only hope now is to buy a complete new PC.

1 hour ago, jarmstro said:

Indeed a tremendous piece of freeware. They look very nice apart from the odd artefact. Unfortunately they have too great an FPS hit for me with anything other than a very small cloud draw distance so I'm sticking with 2D clouds for now. X-Vision seems to mush the default clouds into fluff which look a bit like they are 3D and are OK once you get used to them.

Thanks for trying. 😀

I'm currently downloading Vulkan from scratch. I'd like to see if I can get it to look as good as my XP 11.41 with xVision and Reshade.

@mSparks is there a huge hit in fps with the latest version of xEnviro? I read at the org forums that there's a way to get good fps with some simple changes in the sliders in xEnviro CP. Also, according to xEnviro product page, this weather addon is not compatible with xVision. Will XP 11 Vulkan look as nice as the pics @filou posted without xVision?

Please forgive me for asking, but there are so many confusing things being said by people who are credible. Q8Pilot said in his xEnviro video that the only add-on worth buying is xVision and to use default weather engine to save money. I'm skeptical!

Thankfully, this will be my last purchase for XPlane 11. I'm just tired of wasting money on weather add-ons that don't fix the main issue with this sim: cloud draw distance and the annoying sudden weather changes. It seems like xEnviro is the only weather add-on that fixes this issue for xp11.

Both the XP dev and xEnviro dev should be ashamed of themselves. A customer needs to spend $75 on a weather add-on because the core sim is broken and the xp11 dev team never took the time to address the issue.

Sorry for the rant, but I'm using XP 11.41 for refresher training and I'm loving the experience. 😀

13 minutes ago, DJJose said:

Thanks for trying. 😀

I'm currently downloading Vulkan from scratch. I'd like to see if I can get it to look as good as my XP 11.41 with xVision and Reshade.

@mSparks is there a huge hit in fps with the latest version of xEnviro? I read at the org forums that there's a way to get good fps with some simple changes in the sliders in xEnviro CP. Also, according to xEnviro product page, this weather addon is not compatible with xVision. Will XP 11 Vulkan look as nice as the pics @filou posted without xVision?

Please forgive me for asking, but there are so many confusing things being said by people who are credible. Q8Pilot said in his xEnviro video that the only add-on worth buying is xVision and to use default weather engine to save money. I'm skeptical!

Thankfully, this will be my last purchase for XPlane 11. I'm just tired of wasting money on weather add-ons that don't fix the main issue with this sim: cloud draw distance and the annoying sudden weather changes. It seems like xEnviro is the only weather add-on that fixes this issue for xp11.

Both the XP dev and xEnviro dev should be ashamed of themselves. A customer needs to spend $75 on a weather add-on because the core sim is broken and the xp11 dev team never took the time to address the issue.

Sorry for the rant, but I'm using XP 11.41 for refresher training and I'm loving the experience. 😀

I've wasted a lot of money as well. And like you the cloud draw distance is always the killer and I expect it's exactly the same for X-Enviro unless you have the latest and greatest beast of a machine.